Now that’s just crazy talk. We need to subsidize North Korea’s nuclear weapons program or we’re committing a war crime against humanity.
You’re either willfully misinterpreting both me and him, or failing utterly to recognise the distinction I’m making between “violating human rights” and “violating a specific provision of human rights law which the violator is legally bound to uphold”. One can do the former without doing the latter, unless you believe that there were no human rights violations before there was human rights law. Maybe you do, but that is a rather minority view these days. It certainly does not have the absolutely-correct nature that your replies suggest.
Of course there is. There is signing, ratifying and incorporating. All of these steps create obligations. Signing creates an obligation not to take steps that would defeat the purpose of the treaty. Ratification and incorporation create further obligations still. The reason I brought it up in the first place though was simply to show that the US and South Korea have recognised a right to food in general terms - so if the OP was objecting to the first part of that Carter quote as well as the second, those countries by their own actions have accepted it.
The fact that you clearly do not value its role does not mean that it has none at all.
That will not make it irrelevant. Those decisions may still be cited as persuasive authority, just as decisions of the HRC and national and regional tribunals are often cited in other jurisdictions. They won’t be legally binding but that doesn’t make them irrelevant. In fact the South African Constitutional Court has cited General Comments in its decisions even though South Africa hasn’t even ratified the Covenant let alone the Protocol. Its views are and will continue to be influential in the development of international human rights law generally, even without the binding authority that it presumably will have over some countries in the future.
Even if I accept your apparent definition of “embargo” and I don’t, there is enough else in the General Comment to suggest that the CESCR is likely to agree with Carter.
US foreign policy history is enough for me. As I said, I’m happy to let you believe what you like.
The word “embargo” has a specific meaning.
Etc.
The US is not imposing an embargo on NK. They are making no attempt to prevent NK from trading with other countries for food, merely not giving them freebies.
And you might want to consider why the US is not shipping free food to the Norkies -
Regards,
Shodan
No, the possibilities are not limited to dishonesty or a lack of comprehension of your argument. The middle you’re excluding is the correct answer: you are, still, wrong. On this semantic quibble you’re still wrong, as you cannot violate human rights without violating human rights, and human rights are codified in international law and international custom. As the only bit of international law that’s even been pointed is completely and totally irrelevant, it can be discarded. But Carter’s claim is still that the US is violating some actual facet of international law or international custom, otherwise he’s just being a drooling idiot and there’s no possible charge to be made that we’re actually violating human rights in any way, shape, or form.
No, the fact that I’ve proven it has absolutely no roles is the relevant issue. You’re welcome to play the “well, you’re entitled to your own opinion” card, but rather obviously most people should be able to understand what it means when an advisory body is set up by a protocol that’s not in force, that only three nations in the entire world have ratified, and which has absolutely no authority, even in an advisory context, at all. And then someone else claims that irrelevant body means that perfectly acceptable, legal conduct that’s the norm under international custom is really a “violation of human rights”.
This is a very good indication of the quality of your argument. I use the actual definition of embargo, but it gets in the way of your argument so you’ll decide not to accept it, or invent your own definition. The simple fact is that not providing charity is a totally different phenomena from an embargo. Again, most people realize the difference between interdicting materials and declining to provide them themselves, even if your argument requires that distinction to be ignored.
In other words, you have absolutely no facts at all and all you have is a Conspiracy Theory about nefarious US action when the actual facts provide a perfect explanation of why we’d refuse to throw aid into NK when it will go to the military and the regime’s supporters. So noted.
If what you’re trying to say here is that the only human rights are those which are codified in international law and international custom, then that is an expression of opinion and not a verifiably true or false statement. Many, many people would disagree. I believe that a woman has a human right to an abortion when she considers that to be in her best interest, although that is codified in neither international law nor custom. Others would say that a foetus has a human right to life irrespective of the wishes of the woman whose uterus it occupies. That is not codified in international law or custom either. Same-sex marriage is not codified but many believe it is a human right. There is absolutely nothing extraordinary about asserting that rights exist in the absence of codification, and nor is there anything “wrong” about it, even if some take a contrary view.
It doesn’t require that distinction be ignored. It says that under certain circumstances that distinction is not relevant to whether a right has been violated. As I pointed out already, this is the way the CESCR approaches rights (and I pointed that out in the context of you having based an argument on what the CESCR actually said, so you can forget the “but the CESCR is irrelevant” line here). It is, in fact, also the way the HRC approaches rights, and a number of other national and international bodies. The positive/negative distinction is on its way to obsolescence in human rights law (not fast enough, admittedly).
Note away. Frankly, I consider the suggestion that the US actually acts for humanitarian reasons abroad too absurd to bother getting into a debate about.
Deja vu all over again.
Of course it requires you to ignore the distinction, and it pretends that trying to keep you from getting your paycheck is the same action as refusing to let you pick my pocket. There is no case to be made in international law or international custom that charity is an obligation upon pain of legal sanction. There is no rational case to be made for that, either. Claiming that nations must donate charitable aid to other nations, or be guilty of human rights abuses, puts the concept of “human rights” straight through the looking glass to the point where it’s utterly meaningless. At the point where “human rights” mean that nations have a right to demand other nations’ resources, we’ve utterly lost any pretense to rationality.
This is fictional. What actually happened was that in pointing out the errors in your factual and logical claims, I also pointed out that you were misrepresenting the quote that you had provided, as well.
And no, the positive/negative distinction is not on the way out. The idea that that which is not forbidden is compulsory is an absurdity.
Not only can you not provide proof for your Conspiracy Theory, but now the you simply disregard the fact that the United States ever acts for humanitarian reasons. I’d ask for your reasoning for why the US has engaged in humanitarian missions over the years, but I’m betting it’d be a waste of time on my part.
How is starving innocent people for political reasons not a human rights abuse?
I agree Dio, the North Korean regime is obviously guilty of human rights abuses. Good call.
I concur 100% - those responsible for the starvation in NK are guilty of the worst kind of human rights abuse.
Regards,
Shodan
I think DSeid’s analogy really serves well.
You have a neighbor down the road who spends all his money on guns and ammunition. He spares some money for food, and gives steak dinners to his eldest son who follows him unquestionably, plain rice to his wife and middle son who he doesn’t really trust, and tells his youngest son to go dumpster diving if he wants to eat. He demands that you provide him money for food, and for a while you consent, but you notice that he’s just buying bigger and bigger steaks for himself and his eldest son, and the life of everybody else in the family is the same. Worse, the guy starts taking potshots at you every now and again. When you tell him that you’re not going to give him food anymore, he tells you that you have to. When you tell him that, maybe, he should stop buying so many guns and ammunition and spend that money on food instead, he tells you that’s none of your business and you have to give him more food. You refuse.
Then a bunch of people claim that you’re horribly abusing his family and starving them to death.
Personally I wonder how committed they are to that principle. I have several cats, but I really like video games. From now on I will spend the money I would have spent on cat food on Xbox games instead. If they do not send me cat food, my cats will all starve to death. How horrible it is, of them, to starve my cats to death. Damn cat killers, the lot of them.
I agree as well…good call DtC! 
-XT
It’s easy to chortle when your own kids aren’t starving. The US still has a moral obligation to try.
And it’s easy to take an ivory tower higher moral ground stance when your kids aren’t being threatened with going to a re-education camp, or you aren’t living in a totalitarian police state. The US has no moral obligation to North Korea. We might feel it a duty to at least attempt to help the North Korean PEOPLE, but there are limits to that, and in the end it’s the North Korean GOVERNMENT who has a ‘moral obligation’ and a ‘duty’ to protect and nurture their own people, and provide for their needs.
What’s being asked of the North Korean government that will allow food to be GIVEN to them by the US and South Korea is in no way odious. The fact that the NK’s are the ones balking puts this squarely in their laps, obligation and morals wise.
-XT
Total non-sequitur. Starving those people dosn’t hurt the regime. We are morally obligated to try to feed those people. Excuses are like assholes.
We aren’t starving them…we are not giving them food because their government refuses to meet the minimal demands being placed on them to allow that food to be given to them. We are not preventing them from getting food someplace eles though…like, say China. Or from buying food from someone else. We are merely not giving them our food because of the intransigence of their government. Because their government has created this situation does not make us morally responsible for their fuckup.
This isn’t an ‘excuse’…it’s that ‘reality’ stuff you don’t seem well suited to grasp sometimes.
-XT
The US actions are not starving those people.
Providing food to this regime will not help the suffering population, since the regime has essentially no interest in distributing it to those at need, and the outside world has no ability to make them, or to distribute the food directly to the starving population.
It certainly is. I have already addressed why I completely disagree that it is “immaterial” what the monitoring body for the Covenant in which the right to food is enshrined believes that right to include. For the same reasons I do not believe that it is immaterial that the CESCR considers that states are obliged to assist the populations of other states who are in need - or that many other national and international bodies (including the HRC) take a similar approach in terms of considering that states have certain obligations to act as well as not to act. If you don’t think that the positive/negative distinction is eroding in terms of each creating duties, then frankly you’re either not keeping up or you’re taking a completely US-centric view.
Of course this ignores the extent to which those resources were accumulated through exploitation of other nations. But that’s a separate argument.
In a word, self-interest.
Exactly.
Heh.
We have an obligation to try. Starving the hostages doesn’t hurt the kidnappers.